Resilient, Inclusive, & Sustainable Environments (RISE)
Photo: Conservation International
Environment projects dedicated to addressing gender-based violence
Fostering cross-sector partnership. Pioneering learning.
Gender-based violence (GBV) is pervasive across sectors, affecting more than one in three women worldwide. Deeply interlinked with natural resource access and control, GBV is also exacerbated in the context of environmental degradation and climate change. The Resilient, Inclusive, & Sustainable Environments (RISE) Challenge, funded by USAID, supports organizations to innovatively adapt and implement approaches to address GBV in environmental programming.
Addressing gender-based violence and environment links.
In 2019, based on research findings uncovered during the development of IUCN's research on gender-based violence and environment linkages, USAID’s Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GenDev) designed the RISE Challenge to support the innovative application of promising or proven interventions to address GBV in environmental programming. The RISE Challenge aims to:
• Spur greater awareness of the intersection between environmental degradation and GBV
• Test new environmental programming approaches to prevent and respond to GBV
• Share learning on interventions and policies
• Elevate attention to GBV-environment and attract commitments from other organizations, including implementing partners and donors, for collaboration and co-investment
Building community.
For winners of the RISE challenge, AGENT features their interventions, facilitates access to funding and networking opportunities, and provides technical assistance to support the proposed activity in achieving measurable results and impact.
In natural resources sectors and contexts, preventing and addressing GBV is critical for healthy and sustainable environments as well as for realizing women’s empowerment and gender equality outcomes. The RISE Challenge uniquely identifies and implements interventions to reduce and prevent GBV in environmental programming and environment-related projects.
The grant-making window for RISE is currently closed. Check back for updates in late 2021 or sign up for our GBV-ENV Bulletin. You can see the previous Request for Applications and supporting documents below.
Building knowledge. Informing action.
Inspired by and grounded in the evidence base built by IUCN under its AGENT partnership with USAID, the RISE Challenge projects are now generating new information and learning that help enrich the knowledge base on GBV-environment linkages. Scroll down for project summaries and stories.
Meet the winners!
Meet the nine winners of USAID’s RISE Challenge. These projects do critical work in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Fiji, Guatemala, Kenya, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam. The activities are designed to address GBV in environmental contexts and generate learning and evidence on promising interventions.
Rising Up! Promoting Congolese Women’s Land Access and Preventing GBV in Eastern DRC
- Grantee: Women for Women International
Securing Land Rights and Ending Gender Exclusion Project
- Grantee: Trocaire
- Country: Sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda
Gender Empowerment and Transformation: Tackling Resource-Based Conflict and Gender-Based Violence in Fiji
- Grantee: Marstel-Day
- Country: Asia and the Pacific, Fiji
Creative Capacity Building to Address Gender-Based Violence in the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector
- Grantee: Alliance for Responsible Mining
- Country: Colombia, Latin America and the Caribbean
Resource-ful Empowerment: Elevating Women’s Voices for Human and Environmental Protection in Congolese Small-Scale Mining
- Grantee: Action to Protect Women and Abandoned Children
Advancing Equitable Gender, Social and Power Norms in Community Conservancies
- Grantee: Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association
- Country: Kenya, Sub-Saharan Africa
Reducing Gender-Based Violence in Vietnamese Conservation
- Grantee: WildAct-Vietnam
- Country: Asia and the Pacific, Vietnam
Tz’unun: Ending Environmental Violence Against Indigenous Women in Guatemala through Empowerment in Community Forestry, Agroecology, and Collective Healing Spaces
- Grantee: Utz Che’
- Country: Guatemala, Latin America and the Caribbean
Alto Mayo Landscape Without Gender Violence
- Grantee: Conservation International Foundation
- Country: Latin America and the Caribbean, Peru
Showcasing the latest RISE stories
A collaborative effort
This challenge supports organizations to innovatively adapt and implement promising or proven practices that have been used to effectively prevent and respond to GBV in other sectors to environmental programming.
The challenge draws insights from other development and humanitarian sectors that have proven or promising practices to address GBV. It incentivizes partnerships between environmental organizations, local communities, indigenous peoples organizations, and gender and GBV experts who can help bridge knowledge gaps and work to build an evidence base of effective GBV interventions. Under AGENT, IUCN provides targeted and specific technical support while distilling and sharing experiences from RISE to inform environmental programming.
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